Peter Marks reviews "Black Watch" in The Washington Post

Peter Marks' review today agrees with the unanimous praise for this production:

By the end of 110 remarkable minutes in Shakespeare Theatre Company's Sidney Harman Hall, I was in tears, moved as much by the enthralling stagecraft as by the virile commitment of the superb, 10-man cast. Director John Tiffany, assisted by experts in movement (Steven Hoggett) and music (Davey Anderson), creates astonishing tableaux, whether depicting warriors in meticulous formation or in the simple act of reading letters from home.

To pass up "Black Watch"- which runs only through Sunday - is to deprive yourself of the theater's most ingenious portrait to date of the war in Iraq and of modern warfare in general.

Find the whole review here.

Grand Guignol at Molotov Theatre

 Grand Guignol is a strange and wonderful form of performance originating in France in the 1800s (some people say in response to the bloodlust aroused by the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars). The pleasure in this form of theater comes from outrageous special effects simulating hanging, stabbing, disemboweling, decapitation, and other forms of bloodletting. (In 19th-century France, the violence was often committed upon the person of a beautiful young woman in the course of her utter ruination.) So: kind of like Saw, or Hostel, or Friday the 13th but live onstage.
As you might imagine, one of the conventions of this form of theater is the provision to the audience of special cloaks, to protect them from the gouts of stage blood that will spew from the stage.

DC has one Grand-Guignol theater, Molotov Theatre Company. Looks like they will be opening their next production March 4: Morgue Story, described thus:  A comic book writer and narcoleptic insurance salesman have a date they’ll never forget when they wake up in a morgue with a deranged coroner.

Meanwhile, here's a hilarious excerpt from their weblog, mercilessly ridiculing an audience member who had the temerity to object to being soaked with stage blood:

Brought to you from the desk of Lucas Maloney, Molotov Theatre Group Artistic Director
So we got this email from a less than satisfied customer after one of the performances of our most recent show, The Horrors of Online Dating. By the way, this was the only written complaint that we received for the entirely sold out run. I am posting it with my own editorial comments (found in parenthesis) for your amusement. I have only deleted text concerning identifiers to protect the idiotic and innocent. Everything else here was written by an actual person who lives somewhere nearby…maybe in your own neighborhood! MWAHAHAHAHAHA!
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Let me preface this email by saying that I’m not typically the type to complain about petty little things and especially to write a “formal” complaint in an email like this about something. I tend to be the sort of person who tries to not sweat the small stuff and easily let things go (The first thought I have about a random person when a novella-sized email from him lands in my inbox.).  HOWEVER…I can’t shake this complaint and feel it needs to be voiced….so here I am at after 4am in the morning, still pretty pissed off…and I just need to get this off my chest. (Fasten your seatbelts my dear droogies.)
I attended tonight’s 8pm production of “The Horrors or (sic) Online Dating”.  (He has a tough time with two letter words.) Upon receiving my ticket I was also handed a plastic “cover”, a gargabe (I guess his spell check was tuckered out at 4AM too.) bag material with a hole in it to slip over your head.  Somewhat hesitant, I asked, “What exactly is this for?” (Simpleton, what do you think it’s for? It has a hole for your head and it’s covered in dried blood, and EVERY other person in the theater is wearing one. Oh, and then there is the sign before you enter saying you might get hit with flying fluids. OH! Then there’s that mention about the ponchos and flying blood in every piece of press that was out there! We’re not exactly known for being subtle.)  The reply I was given was, “There are liquids involved in the show and you can use it to keep dry so you don’t get anything on you.” (Doesn’t sound concise enough to be an exact quote that myself or Kevin would say, but it gets the idea across that you may be hit with stuff.)  I proceeded to my seat which was in the very back row, closest to the door, probably one of the “safest” seats in the house (Had he been skilled in the art of deductive reasoning, the blood splatters on the back wall of the theater would have hinted otherwise.) and after a couple minutes of thinking about the fact that I was wearing brand new white shorts and was potentially going to get liquid squirted at me, I went back to the ticket guys and asked, “So just to clarify, what sort of liquids are involved here.  I just want to make sure my clothes aren’t going to get stained or anything.” (We are a HORROR company. TAKE ONE GUESS WHAT KIND OF FLUID IT’S GONNA BE!)  The assuring reply I received as a response to that direct question was, “Oh don’t worry, it’s clear…like water.  It won’t stain.” (I guarantee that was not the reply. It’s fake blood, which is fluid like water, but not clear. I know, I’ve worked with a lot of it. That being said, it’s very expensive fake blood that is washable, which is why we use it.)
If I would have been told the truth at that point that, “It is a red liquid that is supposed to represent (We’re too shallow to “represent” things in our shows. It IS blood .) blood in the show and it may stain” I would have left right there. (Apparently, context clues aren’t this guy’s strength.)  I would have foregone the $12.50 I paid for the ticket and I would have just left as I happened to be wearing new shorts that I was planning to wear to Rehoboth Beach this weekend (Anything for Rehoboth Beach.).  And I was going to see a 10pm production and then go out for drinks afterwards.
The response I was given was a straight out lie (This man has a selective memory. An attractive quality after a regrettable night on the shores of the Rehobs, maybe. For a written complaint, not so much.).  It was a red liquid (I say Holmes, it’s blood!) of some sort (Ben Nye “Zesty Mint” Brand Stage Blood), not a clear liquid, and the truth of the matter is that it does stain and did stain my shorts.
(PSSSSSSSST, POSSIBLE FORESHADDOWING!)
I met friends after the show and when I approached them they both asked me, “What’s all over your shorts?” (I hope it was in unison with hands upon cheeks.)  I replied, “I guess I didn’t read the fine print (Or the sign, or the reviews, or the show description, or listen to the guys at the door, or look at the ponchos that the guys at the door gave you, or the walls of the theater or the other people in the theater.) that whatever clothes I was wearing would be ruined by fake blood in the show I just saw.” (You damn dirty apes!)  I received an “Oh that’s fucked up!” and a “Do you think it’ll come out?” (What did our hero say?)  I replied, “Yes it is fucked up.  And I’m telling myself it will come out so I’m not pissed off just yet.” (Our hero is the picture of poise and restraint.)
I am leaving for Rehoboth Beach in about 7 hours and I am just finally going to bed after attempting to let these shorts soak in cold water, squirting them with (Some sort of soapy, liquidy, laundry-type fluid) Wisk Away stain removing liquid and letting it penetrate the fabric for a while, and then washing them for a full cycle. (I hope I get to the point in my life when things are so stress-free that it will take something as ridiculous as a pair of shorts to keep me up for hours at night. By the way, thanks for the play-by-play of how laundry is done. Madden better watch his back.) The result:  The shorts are ruined.  (That’s funny, because we throw all of our costumes into one laundry load on regular cold cycle. Many of our costumes are lightly colored–white even!–because it shows the blood better. We never had to replace a single costume piece and it came out every night, and we were literally rolling in pools of it onstage.) They are overtly stained with pink splashes all over the front and wearing them would make me look like I was either a man on his period (Which this dude sounds like anyway.) or food stains all over the front of himself.  Not exactly the look I’m going for. (I wonder if he managed to find something… no, ANYTHING else to cover his naughty bits for the trip, or if these shorts were the fatal iceberg to his Rehoboth Titanic? I assure you, this question did not keep me up till 4AM.)
Now again, I’m telling myself, “Get over it.  It’s a pair of shorts. (In the future, listen to those inner thoughts… or learn how to wash a pair of shorts.) This really doesn’t matter in the scheme of life. (See previous editorial comment.) There are bigger fish to fry, etc etc.” (Ibid.)  But you know what…I don’t think I should just cut my losses and move on. (If you had, this wouldn’t be on the Internet now.) The truth of the matter is that nowhere in the advertisement for this show was there any warning that they were going to be squirting fake blood into the audience and that it may stain clothing (Aside from the blood on the poster and all of the other evidence previously mentioned.).  And when I flat out asked the ticket guys about it after being handed a piece of plastic to protect myself, one of the guys was actually in the production and clearly knew very well it wasn’t a clear liquid, (That would be me, a guy who had his white shirt soaked in blood every night, waited a few hours before tossing it in the wash with all the other gore soaked vestments, and found it none the worse for wear the next day.) I was given a flat out lie as a response.  Had a warning been in the production description somewhere, I still would have gone to the show, but I would have worn a grubby dark shirt and an old grubby pair of shorts that I don’t care about getting stained.  I clearly would not have worn a new pair of white shorts. (I wonder if he plans ahead this hard before eating Spaghetti O’s? Why buy a pair of white shorts anyways unless you live in Miami and it’s the 1980’s and you simultaneously have a sweater tied around your neck?)
So yeah, I’m wondering what you would do in this situation if you wore new clothes to a play and they were stained by fake blood that you didn’t know was going to be a part of a production, after you specifically asked about and were told it would be ok because the liquid was clear and would not stain? (I wonder if this horribly written sentence was unintentional, or if he was trying to convey distress through bad sentence structure? Shakespeare was known to do that by using irregular iambic pentameter.)  Am I supposed to politely explain things, at the same time trying not to rant and rave (Too late.) and demand that I get reimbursed $39.99 to cover the cost of the shorts (I’m sure American Eagle will be having an end of season sale real, real soon!)?  I’m sort of leaning towards that option right now. (Good luck.) Do I chalk it up and say, “Oh well.  I just bought those shorts and wore them 3 times and now they are ruined.  So what if they lied to me and as a result, my shorts are ruined.  I’ll just throw away that $39.99 and call it a day.  As long as those crazy kids enjoyed splashing blood all over the audience (We do.), that’s what counts (It does.).”  I can tell you that I’m really not leaning towards that option. (Ever hear of Sisyphus?) Please let me know what you think might be a fair middle ground in this situation.
Thanks for hearing me out and I look forward to a response.
–He who will not be named for his sake.
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Needless to say, there was no response from us but this blog post. In the future, a word to the wise (or at least those who need things spelled out word-for-word)…
“Yes, blood might go in the audience.”
“Yes, you should take a poncho. Look at the current, blood-spattered state of the poncho. For shows that don’t need them, we don’t give them. They are a hassle for us. We need to answer these questions about them and none of us are super great with people. For the love of everything that is holy to you, take the poncho… unless you’re really cool.”
“Yes, it washes out, unless you don’t know how to wash your damn clothes.”
“Yes, we care about our audience members and we hope you have a kick-ass time. We hope we see you again. Maybe you’ll even donate vast sums of money to us so we can cover even more people with blood and force them to create new and groundbreaking beach ensembles. Donations are tax deductable. However, if you’re an idiot and send us something like this… ‘SUCK IT WIMP!’”

Druid presents The Cripple of Inishmaan by Martin McDonagh - Kennedy Center Feb 8-12

Famed Irish theater company DRUID and New York's Atlantic Theatre present The Cripple of Inishmaan, written by Academy Award winner Martin McDonagh and directed by Tony Award winner Garry Hynes, the first woman to win a Tony Award for Best Direction. Set in rural Ireland in 1934, this dark comedy depicts the impact that a Hollywood film crew has over the local residents when it shows up to document the tiny island of Inishmore. When a young, orphaned "cripple" named Billy Claven is selected for a part in the film, his dreams of escape take flight.

McDonagh's plays are usually hilarious, violent, and bizarre--often described as classical Irish theater as updated by Quentin Tarrantino. He wrote and directed the great, underrated Colin Farrell vehicle, In Bruges.

One of Bernard's Best Bets for Spring 2011 theater.

Synetic Theater

Hamlet (and Others) as the Strong, Silent Type
By PATRICK HEALY
January 21, 2011

WASHINGTON — For their first attempt at wordless Shakespeare — that’s right, wordless Shakespeare — the husband-and-wife leaders of the Synetic Theater company chose to apply their physical-theater aesthetic to “Hamlet,” counting on audiences’ familiarity with the plot.

In place of three-plus hours of verse, Synetic presented 90 minutes of highly stylized dance, movement, acrobatics, pantomime, music and story. “To be or not to be” was never uttered, but Hamlet stormed across the stage, gesturing to convey desperation. He and Ophelia never touched; their tortured attraction was reflected, instead, by the two actors’ bringing “their fingertips to within a hair’s breadth of each other,” as The Washington Post noted in its rave review in 2002.

Just a year-old troupe at the time, Synetic ended up drawing wide critical praise and winning local theater awards as best resident play for “Hamlet” and best director and best choreographer for the husband-and-wife team, Paata and Irina Tsikurishvili, who also played Hamlet and Ophelia. Since then Synetic has won many more local awards — mostly for wordless Shakespeare stagings like “Macbeth” and “Romeo and Juliet” — as well as a devoted following in this city and nationally among admirers of physical theater.

Émigrés from the former Soviet republic of Georgia whose style draws on the popular tradition of pantomime there, the Tsikurishvilis (pronounced T-SEE-koorish-VEAL-ee) have also been embraced by establishment theaters here.

“No one does what they do — not in Washington or, really, anywhere that I know of,” said Michael M. Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, who has advised the couple on building a theatrical troupe and provided performance space for some Synetic productions.

Read the New York Times article on Washington's Synetic Theater here.

Drama with roots in the real world is burgeoning theater field

By Nelson Pressley
The Washington Post
Friday, January 21, 2011; 2:00 PM

Long before the reality-TV craze took off, there was Anna Deavere Smith, the virtuoso mimic who carried her tape recorder into riot minefields to create "Fires in the Mirror" (about New York's Crown Heights conflict in 1991) and "Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992" (exploring the Rodney King beating and aftermath). Already a decade into her work then, Smith was a pioneer in terms of creating "documentary" theater. Aside from writer-director Emily Mann's "theater of testimony," which included "Execution of Justice" - at Arena Stage and then on Broadway in the mid-1980s, and dealing with Harvey Milk's assassination - Smith had few peers to emulate or models to work from.

Twenty years later, behold the burgeoning docudrama field. Examples of this surprisingly flexible form include "The Exonerated" (about death row inmates wrongly convicted) and journalist Lawrence Wright's solo stage forays ("My Trip to Al-Qaeda" in 2005, "The Human Scale" in Manhattan last fall). There's also Eve Ensler's perpetually performed "The Vagina Monologues," based on interviews. And there's Doug Wright's PulitzerPrize- and Tony Award-winning "I Am My Own Wife," which put facts up for grabs as the playwright rooted through documents and his own provocative interviews with a slippery East German transvestite who survived World War II.

"Some of the work has been very, very impactful," says Moises Kaufman, who directed "I Am My Own Wife" on Broadway. "These are works that over the last decade have been among the most performed plays in America."

The verbatim wave is hitting a high tide now at major Washington area theaters. Smith is holding forth at Arena Stage with "Let Me Down Easy" - a meditation on health, health care and death, drawn from 320 interviews and performed with her trademark panache as she impersonates doctors, patients and celebrities (Lance Armstrong, Ann Richards and others, including Ensler). . . .

Read the full article here.

Black Watch at the Shakespeare Theatre Company's Sidney Harman Theatre

From the Washington Post article by Lavanya Ramanathan, Thursday, January 20, 2011

A docu-play of sorts, Black Watch was inspired by Scotland's famed Black Watch military regiment, which lost three men in a roadside bombing in Iraq in 2004, a defeat soon followed by news that the elite unit, which had fought since the 18th century, was being disbanded. ... The play flits between scenes from the pub in Scotland (where an interviewer has come to talk with the soldiers, just as Burke did) and flashbacks to Camp Dogwood, an outpost in a particularly dangerous region of Iraq. (A warning: The play, written in the voices of young military men, is peppered with crude language and cruder jokes.)

The show's first performance was at the Edinburgh Fringe. Before the three-week stint was up, the company had decided to tour, taking the show to New Zealand, Australia, Ireland and Los Angeles, among other big cities. In New York, every ticket for the first run in 2007 was snapped up, and the second run was extended by nearly a month. The performances in Washington - which for Shakespeare Theatre follow last summer's successful production of another war drama, The Great Game - will kick off a longer U.S. tour of Black Watch.

Read the full article here.

AS2010 Humanities II - The Stage and the World - Spring 2011

Theater is a symbolic social space, enacting both the community that unites us and the divisions that keep us apart. This interdisciplinary course considers the power of the stage by focusing on the elements and contexts of symbolic actions, crossing the lines usually drawn between theater, performance art, and performative acts in culture and everyday life. The course adopts the perspective of directors, actors, and designers as they develop their own approaches to theater and performance, drawing upon sociology, anthropology, semiotics, and modern theatrical performance theory.

OBJECTIVES:
By the time you complete this course, you should be able to:
• Develop a critique of a theatrical performance, based on established aesthetic standards and your own ideas about the goals of performance
• Identify the distinguishing characteristics of theater and performance art, and consider them in historical, social and cultural context
• Analyze a playscript according to the model of directors’ and actors’ work in developing a theatrical production
• Compare theories of theater historically--from traditional western drama, non-western performance models, and avant-garde theater of the past century
• Analyze rituals in light of fundamental principles of anthropology, sociology and performance theory
• Identify and analyze aspects of performance in everyday life
• Characterize how performance theory affects and influences other forms of art and ideas about culture, politics and society